Every morning I get US News delivered to my door. It’s the only dead tree newspaper I’ve ever subscribed to in my life. Lest you begin to think this is some kind of endorsement, know that I never signed up for it, I don’t pay for it and I tried a couple of times to cancel the thing. It’s a pestilence.
When I say delivered to my door, I actually mean chucked out of a moving car onto the bottom of my driveway. This means that every day if I don’t pick the thing up and throw it out it will accumulate, rain or shine. When it snows we inevitably miss picking up a few and after the melt find a few soaked lumps of pulp we then scrape into a garbage can.
But US News doesn’t care. They’re selling ads. It’s better thought of as an advertisement flier than a newspaper even though every day they publish news stories. And my routine has settled into a grim coexistence with this pest on my driveway. Each morning on my way to work I pick it up and at least get to muse at what headline they decided to put above the fold. It’s a kind of meta-curiosity for me: what is the world focused on today? Then, without even the courtesy of unfolding the thing, I casually toss it into the train station garbage as I jog to my 632am ride into town.
Today I opened it.
US News obviously noticed my haughty indifference and mutated to deliver its payload (advertisements) to its destination (my driveway) more efficiently. You know what doesn’t matter to US News, anymore? The news. Check out the front page:
I realize this kind of publicity is what they wanted but they can only abandon their journalistic integrity once (assuming this is the first time). Hope it paid well!
Not Unreasonable 